PatrIoT: Quality Assurance System for Internet of Things Technology

The main goal is to design, implement and verify a framework for quality assurance of products based on the Internet of Things concept. The aim of the framework is to help individual IoT projects to establish an efficient testing and verification strategy of the infrastructure. The proposed framework is based on a model of the IoT infrastructure, composed of methodological part, driven by university team, and a technical part, mainly worked on by Red Hat engineers. The design of the framework aims to be compliant with continuous integration approach emphasizing automation of testing and the quality assurance process.

To learn more about how this initiative will help quality assurance organizations evaluate large-scale IoT systems using open source tools, please refer to the article by Štefan and his team in Red Hat Research Quarterly magazine Volume 1, Issue 1.

Project Update

This collaborative project of RedHat and System Testing IntelLigent Lab at the Czech Technical University in Prague was successfully finished in 2020. However, several components of the solution are further evolving. Project results have been or are applied in several following projects, contributing to increased reliability and safety of various created IoT systems. During the project, the project team successfully submitted three patent applications in the IoT field. Created test automation framework, PatrIoT, is currently available on GitHub, https://patriot-framework.io/.

Created test automation framework has been applied to create new automated integration tests for AMQ Online Red Hat product, where it brought savings compared to potential effort if the regression integration tests were executed manually. Besides the AMQ Online product, the IoT test automation framework is being applied in several other pilot projects from various IoT fields. In these pilot projects, a test strategy is defined, test cases are automatically generated from the system model, and automated tests are created. As an example of such a project, we can mention a test strategy and automated test design in a project developing a prototype of the new generation system for planning and managing rescue missions conducted by the Police of the Czech Republic and the Mountain Rescue Service.

Another project where PatIoT has been used during the development is a sensor network supporting combat casualty care, which is being created in cooperation between Czech Technical University in Prague, the University of Defence, the Czech Army and other partners. Selected details from this project and one of testing tools used in its development are given in article by Miroslav Bureš in Red Hat Research Quarterly magazine February 2023.

Selected publications

Miroslav Bures. “Framework for Integration Testing of IoT Solutions.” The 2017 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI’17), track on Internet of Things & Internet of Everything (CSCI-ISOT)

Bures, M., Bellekens, X., Frajtak, K., Ahmed, B. S. A Comprehensive View on Quality Characteristics of the IoT Solutions. EAI International Conference on IoT in Urban Space, pp. 59-69, Springer, 2018.

Bures, M., Cerny, T., Ahmed, B. S. Internet of Things: Current Challenges in the Quality Assurance and Testing Methods. Information Science and Applications 2018, LNEE vol.514, Springer, 2018, pp.625-634.

Ahmed, B. S., Bures, M., Frajtak, K., & Cerny, T. (2019). Aspects of Quality in Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions: A Systematic Mapping Study. IEEE Access, 7, 13758-13780.